It’s like our loose-wired columnist is actually in touch with the real world. “I’d like to pay tribute to Daft Punk,” he said the other day. Knew there was a reason we bury this stuff on the back page…
When Daft Punk split up, it was like losing a favourite fourth cousin twice removed. Or misplacing a favourite finger-scraping of belly button fluff. Or losing a leg to a Venus flytrap. A world without Daft Punk is like ‘Star Wars’ without C-3PO and the other one. Their demise had me sobbing in Auto-Tune as I ripped my Daft Punk T-shirt from my grieving body until I was thrown out of Tesco Express.
Almost everyone knows who Daft Punk were, but for those old fogies who never followed music trends beyond Mike Oldfield bonking his tubular bells with a rolled-up copy of Look-in magazine, here’s a potted history.
Daft Punk formed in a place called Paris, which is in a small suburb of Belgium called France. Paris is most famous for having a Blackpool Tower where the candy floss is made of expensive cheese. You might remember it from the film ‘Paris, Texas’.
The band was discovered by a Glasgow record label called Soma, a big name in Scottish techno, which is like normal techno, but with sword dancing. One of their early singles was called ‘Da Funk’ because there is no “the” in French.
This record emulated the noise of Charly the cat caught by his balls on an electric fence while being beaten to death by a Roland TB-303. This sounds awful, like a screaming orphan or ‘Money For Nothing’ by Dire Straits, but it was a vast improvement on the existing dance music trend of Geri Halliwell doing the cha-cha-cha while dressed as Lion-O from ‘ThunderCats’.
Incidentally, Daft Punk rhymes with ‘Da Funk’. This is the most impressive artist/single rhyming combo since Cole Porter’s old time classic ‘Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter’. Anyway, never mind that wordplay, no one reads this page because they enjoy words.
Who was Daft Punk and how? Daft Punk was made of two robots
called Thomas Boom-Bang-a-Bang and Guy-Pearce Out-Of-Neighbours.
They played synthesisers even though they were robots and could have just played themselves.
Their song ‘Around The World’ was unnecessarily repetitive. Their song ‘Around The World’ was unnecessarily repetitive. Their song ‘Around The World’ was unnecessarily repetitive. In live sets, whenever a fan requested their hit single ‘One More Time’, Daft Punk would take it literally and re-play the track they had just played.
Many concerts lasted months. Despite this, the president of the United States, Kim Kardashian West, named her four children after Daft Punk tracks: Harder West, Better West, Faster West, and Lose Yourself To Dance Featuring Pharrell Williams West.
In later years, Daft Punk expanded their sound. They teamed up with Niles Crane out of ‘Frasier’ to write the disco-inspired ‘Get Lucky’. They wrote ‘Starboy’ with an act called The Weeknd who sounds clevr, but he’s unawre of how lettrs work. And they made the music for ‘Tron Legacy’, a film in which people ride special motorbikes in straight lines like, er, normal motorbikes.
Daft Punk will never be forgotten, like the black death or Acid Brass. Why not make your own techno robot by sticking googly eyes onto your hoover? Although please don’t do this with a Henry hoover, that plastic face is creepy enough without adding extra eyes to make some kind of carpet-sucking insectoid freak.
We’re just going to have to cope, but maybe next time you see a couple of hand dryers in a toilet, or perhaps two wheelie bins overloaded with tinsel, you’ll wistfully remember Thomas Bangles and Guy-Fawkes out of Drab Pump, or whatever their name was.
